An Observation, Truthful Approximation, and the ArXiv

Suppose you have an interesting result that has an easy, almost trivial proof. What is the best way to publish it? Writing a full, formal paper takes too much energy. Besides, a travel to a conference just to give a 5 minutes presentation is an overkill, and journals are just too slow (who reads them anyways?)

The result in question regards the basic issue in algorithmic mechanism design of to what extent does incentive compatibility penalize computationally efficient approximation algorithms. Shahar observed that known techniques imply that, at least for artificial problems, incentive compatibility may result in an unbounded degradation.

I talked Shahar (who is my just-graduating student) into writing it up and uploading it to the arxiv, here.

I think that the question that Shahar raises (how to “publish” easy stuff), as well as the answer he gives (unbounded price of incentive compatibility), are both interesting (though not really related) — so here they are.